Savage Read-along – Week 2

I’m not exactly catching up in my reading of The Savage Detectives, but I’m not falling further behind either. I finished with section one today, so now I’ve officially finished week two of the Savage Readalong. Bibliolatrist’s thoughts on this week are here, and the Bibliobrat’s thoughts are here.

Warning: my read-along thoughts contain spoilers.

The second half of section one reads like the first half, except with 50% more aimlessness and indolent artiness than before. Juan García Madero bounces everywhere but where he should be, at home with his aunt and uncle. Between nights of sleeping with the various women who throw themselves at him, he wanders between cafes and bars writing poetry, steals books from multiple bookstores, and gossips with his fellow visceral realists.

For the most part, I like him even less than I did before. The primary reason is that he doesn’t participate in his own life. He’s not only a follower, he follows others merely because they happen to be in front of him at a particular moment in time. I despise that kind of aimlessness (even though I sometimes partake of it myself).

The side characters become more interesting though. I cannot for the life of me determine what motivates Quim Font, the father of one of García Madero’s love interests, Maria Font. But in a weird way he endears himself to me. Both he and his daughter have an agency that I admire. Quim is a crazy man. One moment he’s encouraging García Madero, giving him money. The next he’s pretending to be his daughter when he answers the phone in order to get information out of her paramour. It’s not because he’s trying to meddle in her affairs, it’s because he knows the boy will confide if he thinks it’s her. Maria acts the haughty sorority girl, but has her own moments of tenderness. I love these mixed portraits, and the two of them became very real and thus interesting characters in my mind. My worry is that they disappear in the following section.

I noted above that for the most part I didn’t like García Madero. He ended the section on a note I appreciated, making a decision and acting in his own life, even if without much thought. This made me perk up! An auspicious lead in to the following section.

Man, do I ever focus on agency! There’s probably a lot I’m missing here. One entry in this first-person diary like section consists of a list of the works and poets that García Madero stole that day. There’s got to be some intelligent commentary to extrapolate from the poets mentioned throughout the section, or from the references to the Paz camp but I don’t have the foggiest idea about poetry, particularly Spanish poetry, to stick my nose there.

Ah well, that’s it for this week. Maybe I’ll catch up a day or two for this next week.